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India's politics and corruption is even worse from what I understand. I had this really cool Indiabro security guard who told me all about how things were back home. I guess most things in government are done with bribes, if you go to a doctor to get medical treatment you bribe them for better service etc. Even though its a bribe I guess most indians know all about it like its public information and a normal part of the culture there.

I don't believe that. Every single billionaire out there is looking to "disrupt" existing industries. Right now a bunch of different people control a bunch of different birth control products. If you are the one person who makes the single best birth control, you get all the money instead of just some.

Yeah, it's like people think rich people are all in cahoots. If Company A can make a killing by being first to market with a new form of birth control, they're not going to care if Company B loses out on condom sales or whatever.

It's like people simultaneously think companies are so short sighted they they're willing to sacrifice almost anything for good quarterly results, but so long-term oriented that they don't want to introduce any new technologies that might lead to a long term decline.

Company A isn't in league with company B in the scenario they posit; that's absurd. Rather, Company B to Company Z sell condoms, and a one-time, reversible procedure cuts them all in the hamstrings. So B to Z all work to smear A and its new product, and all lobby to block it due to safety concerns.

So really, it's not that the makers will kill their own products; it's everyone else who has a good system in place, and stands to have that disrupted.

This would be great for me. I am in a monogamous long term relationship with a woman on a form of BC. If she could get off it, I know she would. Also, I think this gives a lot of personal power to young men when it comes to preventing unwanted childbirth. Condoms for inebriated men are always questionable from what I've seen in my friend groups, or people lie about it to sound cool. If it isn't an extra step and it doesn't reduce pleasure that will be highly appealing.

yeah i'll parrot that. it seems like it's much harder for women to find a consistent long term BC solution that doesn't mess them up in some way or another. i would be more than happy to get all blocked up instead of my partner.

RISUG has been available in India as a general treatment since around 1995. It's been in testing in the US for a decade as Vasalgel but the FDA requires a huge number of trials. Parsemus has done rabbit, dog and baboon studies, all of which have been successful and complicated because (who knew?) humans have much simpler and tougher vas deferens than other mammals.

The baboons were kept in a large enclosure, similar to living in a zoo. They were left with a certain number of males and females and were allowed to have sex as much as they liked. which they did. They were as humane as possible in their trials.

It's reabsorbed. The body has a few different mechanisms for reabsorbing the various fluids present in ejaculate. After all, vasectomies involve the body's absorption of sperm as well when the vas deferens is cut or cauterized. It wouldn't be any different with Vasalgel.

Actually, vasagel is different from a vasectomy in that the polymer they use is permeable to everything in ejaculate except sperm. So you still ejaculate but don't have any of (or very few of) the back pressure issues that happen with a full vasectomy. At least, that's the theory.

Lol! Since it has to be injected into a sensitive part of male anatomy, somehow I don't think pharmacists will be involved! Hopefully they won't put an intern in charge, either, or I foresee some real mix-ups!

oh god, imagine if our socks leave our universe before getting cleaned but arrive in theirs after their dryer has spun down. Could you imagine how annoying that would be for them. Hopefully they never figure out how to get over to our side or it could be all out war.

So why do reddit and other mainly American communities talk about wanking into socks so much? Are y'all too lazy to get a tissue? This is an entirely foreign concept to me but it seems quite widespread in the US.

Will be waiting at least 10 years before trying, just incase those lawyer commercials come up, asking if I'm experiencing the following side effects from it; testicles coming through urethra, blood and guts from rectum, or trouble sleeping

lol girlfriends niece and nephew were over last night. One is 3, one is 6. The 3 year old shit herself twice, okay whatever she's three. Six year old wanted in the limelight too and shit himself on purpose.

Apparently my brother did exactly the same thing when we were kids. He never did it again because dad took him outside and cleaned him off with the garden hose. He didn't like the cold water with the ambient temperature being 18 degrees Celsius.

If you're a lawyer, I have a tip (you'll get my bill in the mail): when you're in labour, don't break out the "I'm a lawyer and can't wait to get back to work" bit as the doc is trying to deliver your baby.

I used to joke about that. Then my wife and I found out we can't have kids. It's a bummer to know it isn't even an option unless we go down the route of egg donors or adoption. At this point we're just glad to have each other.

There are similar technologies in use in India right now. Look of RISUG. This is actually a derivative that is probably safer than the original concept. That being said, I have no idea where you could find reliable sources on its safety from India.

Reversibility is a bit complicated, but the outlook seems positive. The method this was based on (RISUG) has undergone human trials in India, and I vaguely recall that did show long-term reversibility in humans. That method has shown essentially 100% success, save for a couple of botched injections that post-procedure testing could catch (similar to vasectomies).

The US-based researchers successfully showed one-year reversibility in rabbits (with a paper currently in peer review), but it didn't work on their baboon models. Because the reversal is largely mechanical, their explanation seems fairly persuasive. (TL;DR: Baboons are a bit more fragile there than humans and rabbits, so it's likely a model issue.)

They'll probably start human trials as a vasectomy alternative and test reversibility at that point: they don't have enough to promise reversibility, but their existing tests should be enough to show that "not working" is the worst that could happen.

It's an ethical minefield though. I suppose you have to ask why you are doing it at all. If its just for the lols its probably best avoided, if you are trying to breed an orc army get some military funding and go nuts.

This is pretty key. I don't want kids now, I want to have them when I'm 60 years old and marry somebody half my age. 100% effective is pretty neat, but I want to reverse the process if I decide it's a good idea!

I've been reading about vasalgel for a while. I'm pretty sure I read that the monkey reversability was not that accurate to humans. Apparently monkeys have a very narrow vas deferens. It's likely that reversability in humans would be more successful than in monkeys.

I'm pretty sure they were in talks about trying reversability with dogs because their vas deferens is more like that of humans.

This would be an interesting option for curbing teen pregnancy as well. Get this done at puberty and then you can have it reversed when you are interested in having kids instead of people playing the reverse lottery until they want to have kids. If that were to happen, it would be interesting to see the correlation with std infections.

No not really. The number of people who use the pull out method is obscene. Add to this the pill, IUD's, hormone shots, and getting snipped/tied, the amount of sex using non-barrier contraceptives is really high. Adding another non-barrier contraceptive to this list won't change much.

People use condoms with one night stands, which is also where you're most likely to get an STI. The condom is "so we don't get pregnant" but also stops STI transmission. If a guy has the shot, suddenly it's "we don't need a condom, don't you think I'm clean?" And we all know how that conversation is ending since insulting the hygiene of a potential sexual partner is a good way to not get laid.

Seeing as how unplanned pregnancies already cost taxpayers $11 billion a year, there would certainly be benefits.

And the benefits will be much greater when America finally catches up to the rest of the developed world in acknowledging the fundamental human right to healthcare (as established under Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Right, which the US voted in favor of back in 1948).

I do. With a proper socialized medical system, there's absolutely no way that providing birth control is going to be more expensive than the societal cost of an unwanted pregnancy.

But in America's corrupt system, it all depends on how many pounds of flesh that the pharmaceutical industry and their shareholders want to take. This is on top of the fact that IP laws in this country effectively force Americans to subsidize drug development for the entire world.

I've always thought about this, if something like this was done at birth across the board, basically making every pregnancy intentional, I feel like it would have a massive impact on humanity in general. People would be more successful, obtain more education, and children would have a greatly increased amount of opportunity due to their parents being in a good, steady part of their lives before choosing to have a kid.

It seems like I'm hearing how we are going to have to tax robots because of they are taking our jobs, so this sort of seems like an answer to automation. As automation increases and the number of jobs decreases, if the workforce also decreased that would be a synergistic thing.

hate this title.i've been hearing about this shit for 5 years now and the way it was worded made it look like they did it on humans and it worked. no it was on monkeys. they've had this study for years now.

The monkey study was completed less than two full years ago (near the end of 2015), and the peer-reviewed paper the article was talking about was only published a couple months back. That's a major step: all the press releases in the world don't mean shit if it doesn't pass peer review, and having a peer-reviewed primate study pretty much guarantees they'll be able to move forward to human clinical trials.

I have had the unfortunate experience of a bacterial infection in my epidiymus, and I can say with certainty that it is very real. Empty your bladder before physical activities (sports included), guys, apparently there is risk of urine backflow, as my doctor described it to me. (I'm guessing that was very much an ELI5 he gave me, no clue what the actual scientific process is).

What's worse is the semi-frequent articles stating "A new advancement allows use of quantum entanglement in communications!" and I go "YAY! FTL Communications!...wait...wait...fucking entanglement based security!".

Giving men testosterone + progesterone (analogous to female hormonal birth control using estrogen + progesterone) is actually quite effective (early 2000s numbers saw it work in 90% of men). But there is a risk of muscle growth as a side effect, which is apparently unacceptable for our society.

It's probably hard to say. Some potential side effects of a vasectomy might not show up for years, and all of them occur at pretty low rates. Vaselgel has, in terms of trials, only been going on for 10-15 years, and even if no symptoms have shown, it doesn't mean they won't when it sees widespread adoption over a longer period of time.